In the Beginning
“It became clear to me that the education of urban planners needed a more systematic and scientific grounding for planning practice.” – F. Stuart Chapin1
As the troops returned home after World War II, cities in the U.S. were still the focal point for regional economies and culture. Downtowns were thriving as most of the jobs and commercial activity were located in central cities. In the 1950s, however, things began to change. Migration to suburban areas, large-scale urban renewal, the creation and growth of the interstate highway system, and racial tensions led to dramatic changes in America’s urban areas and their surrounding regions. With those transformations came an increased interest in understanding the forces behind the changes and in effective policies for addressing their negative impacts. This desire for a better understanding of urban and regional change and its consequences motivated the creation of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The Center for Urban and Regional Studies began as a working group within the Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Institute supported a number of studies on urban issues, including anthropological studies of Southern communities and a study of urbanization in the South.
In 1954 IRSS applied for and received a Ford Foundation grant to conduct a self-study on behavioral sciences at UNC-CH. The Behavioral Science Survey Committee was created and it identified six focal areas with “implications for research.”1 One of these focal areas, “demography and social epidemiology,” had a sub-area entitled “urban processes.”2 Consequently, in his
1954-55 annual report, Gordon Blackwell, the director of IRSS, highlighted “urban studies” as an important topic for future research.3
Capitalizing on the Institute’s interest in urban studies, F. Stuart Chapin, Jr., who joined the faculty of the Department of City and Regional Planning in 1949,4 facilitated a series of luncheon meetings that were attended by faculty members from the city planning, political science, and sociology departments. In these meetings the participants shared their own research on urbanization in America and developed a framework for studying the processes underlying urbanization. In 1955, this group’s activities grew to include a bi-monthly faculty seminar that involved faculty from anthropology, economics, psychology, and social work. This larger group, called the Urban Studies Committee, worked to expand the conceptual framework for studying urban development processes.5 The seeds for a large-scale study of urbanization had been planted.
The Early Years
“…the Urban Studies Program has as a central and unifying theme an interest in urban development in the Piedmont Industrial Crescent…”6
Although the Urban Studies Committee had successfully created a forum for urban researchers, it wanted to expand its capacity for conducting cutting edge, collaborative research on urban issues and implement the
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of
the Center for Urban and Regional Studies
Anne Patrone
In recognition of the 50
thanniversary of the Center for Urban and Regional studies, Anne Patrone wrote
a detailed history focusing on the legacy of the Center, its work, and its people. The following is an
abbreviated version of this retrospective.
conceptual framework for collaboration. Over a two-year period from 1955-1957, the Committee prepared a grant proposal titled “Emerging Forms of Metropolitanism in the South,” focusing on the Piedmont Industrial Crescent – the area along the transportation corridor connecting Washington,D.C., to Atlanta. The Committee proposed to study the area of the crescent between Raleigh, N.C. and Greenville, S.C., because of its proximity to the University, and because it thought that such a study would shed light on a new kind of urbanization, one driven by the rapid proliferation of the automobile and new road construction.
In April of 1957, the Ford Foundation awarded the Committee a five-year, $1 million grant to pursue its urban research agenda, including a multifaceted study of urbanization processes in the Piedmont Industrial Crescent. This grant also facilitated communication among urban researchers at southern universities. IRSS housed both of these activities, with Chapin heading up the research arm and Frederic M. Cleaveland directing the outreach program. A third portion of the grant went to the Institute of Government to fund research interpretation for state and local organizations. Perhaps most importantly to this history, the Ford Foundation funding formalized Chapin’s collective of researchers in the form of the Urban Studies Program, the organization that would in 1963 be renamed the Center for Urban and Regional Studies.
The Piedmont Crescent project was highly interdisciplinary. It focused on seven distinct research areas. The areas were:
• Economic studies of the Piedmont Crescent; • Leadership patterns and community
decision-making in cities of the Piedmont Crescent;
• Power structure studies of the Piedmont Crescent and the intercity and intracity aspects of interaction; • Newcomers to urban centers: Why they move and
their socio-political enculturation in the city; • Role of the planner in urban development of the
Piedmont Crescent
• Livability qualities of urban development in the Piedmont Crescent; and
• Metropolitan development problems in the Piedmont Crescent and alternative approaches to their solution.
These areas of study reflected the diverse interests of the Urban Studies Program’s interdisciplinary research team, including faculty members and research fellows from city and regional planning, economics, political science, and sociology.
The original grant proposal delineated a research period of five years, but as the project progressed, it became clear that work would need to extend into a sixth. After the expiration of the Ford Foundation grant,
additional funding was secured from the state and other grant sources. By 1963,7 the research effort had expanded to include fifteen research areas involving over 20 members of the faculty and 27 research assistants. Program research results were published through the Urban Studies Research Paper series, and in Urban Growth Dynamics in a Regional Cluster of Cities (1962), edited by Stuart Chapin and Shirley Weiss, a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Many of the Program’s researchers contributed chapters on the different project areas, and in Chapin’s words, the book sought to “lay the groundwork for research which inevitably will absorb social scientists for the next generation.”8
From the Program to the Center
“As it has evolved over the past few years, our mission has been to serve as a center on the campus for the study of contemporary issues and problems in urban affairs in the American scene.” – F. Stuart Chapin, Jr.9
In 1963, the Institute for Research in Social Science renamed the Urban Studies Program the Center for Urban and Regional Studies. Chapin continued to serve as Director and Shirley Weiss was appointed Assistant Director. At this time, the Center identified four “core study” topics for further exploration: the role of the planner in urban issues; political decision-making about urban development issues; urban spatial structure and patterns of land development; and the role of industrial executives in urban growth and development.10
Chapin’s interest in the factors that influence urban development led him to approach the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads (the predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration) to secure funding for developing a model of residential land use.11 In 1963, the Center negotiated a contract with the Bureau to develop a model for Greensboro, N.C., where, in the late 1940s, Chapin had served as planning director. The Center enlisted the help of the University’s Computation Center to analyze growth patterns from 1949 to 1963. Chapin and his colleagues identified a number of factors that affected urban growth patterns, including access to employment, schools, and public facilities. Based on this analysis, the researchers created a model to predict where future residential development was likely to occur. A monograph from this study, titled “A Probabilistic Model for Residential Growth,” was published in 1965, and the growth model became known as the University of North Carolina Model.
serve all of a city’s inhabitants. To achieve this, the study explored how urban residents in two low-income neighborhoods – one with mostly black residents and one with mostly white residents – allocated their time to different activities and how they utilized city space for those activities.12 The project was expansive, involving twelve researchers and five separate studies. Three books, including Chapin’s Human Activity Patterns in the City (1974), were published from this series of studies. Chapin’s work in Washington brought him to the attention of federal officials and led to his appointment to President Johnson’s Task Force on Cities, convened from 1966-67. In this capacity, Chapin visited many of America’s tumultuous inner cities and prepared a section of the Task Force report to the President. Support from the State
“Things urban were really important, and were being funded, and so, it was a really good time to convince the state legislature that they ought to fund an urban center that would do applied policy-oriented research of use to the state of North Carolina, to make sure that we addressed urban problems in a sound way and came up with solutions.”– Ray Burby13
In 1969, national attention to urban issues was reaching a crescendo. In response to inner-city rioting, white flight, business relocations, and other urban issues, the General Assembly of North Carolina authorized a “Program in Urban Affairs” for the Consolidated University of North Carolina. The funding provided to this program – which supported urban studies centers at UNC-Charlotte and NC State as well as UNC-Chapel Hill – allowed the Center to become independent of IRSS.
The following year Jonathan Howes took over as the Center’s second director. Over his twenty-year tenure as Director, he held an array of positions with federal agencies, and served as mayor of Chapel Hill from 1987 to1991. Other staff were similarly occupied with local, state and national leadership. In particular, Ray Burby held positions on the North Carolina Land Use Congress, the NC Chapter of the American Planning Association, and, with Ed Kaiser, co-edited the Journal of the American Planning Association from 1983 to1988.
In 1972, the Center received, what at the time was the largest award in its history, a $1,179,400 grant from the National Science Foundation to support research on “new towns.” The Center first hosted a series of three seminars on new towns in 1969, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Researchers also conducted over 5,500 interviews in 36 sample communities (both new towns and “conventional” communities). The final result was New Communities USA, published in 1976, written by Ray Burby and
Shirley Weiss. This study remains the definitive work on the new towns created during this period. Other research conducted at the Center during the 1970s focused on the emerging issues of the era: the energy crisis, hazard mitigation and coastal planning and the constitutionality of growth management.
In the late 1980s, in the interest of unifying the research and public service missions of both the Center and DCRP, the Center was brought under the jurisdiction of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. On August 1, 1988, the new administrative structure became official. And in 1994 the current directorship of William Rohe began, following Jonathan Howes’ appointment as Secretary of the Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources under North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt.
A New Collaborative Focus
Led by Rohe’s commitment to broad collaboration within and beyond the university, the Center’s research activity began to rapidly expand as many new Faculty Fellows were attracted to the Center. By 1996, there were 51 Faculty Fellows from 16 departments. Aiding in the recruitment of these Fellows was a new center policy (also borrowed from the Carolina Population Center) to share a portion of overhead funds with the Fellows’ home departments and with the principal investigators. Adopting this Faculty Fellows model solved one of the Center’s previous dilemmas: finding enough talented researchers without the resources to hire them directly.
By the end of 1996, the Center reached its greatest productivity in a decade, supporting 25 research projects.14 In 1996, Thomas Arcury, a Senior Research Associate, was awarded the largest single grant in the Center’s history15 – $1.2 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a study on farm workers’ exposure to agricultural chemicals. By 2000, the Center had surpassed the $5.5 million mark in extramural funding, managing $5.8 million in grants.
In the later part of the 1990s the Center also expanded its staff. By 2000, the Center had eight full-time and 2 part-time employees on staff. From 1994-2000, the number of Faculty Fellows increased from 51 to 57. The number of graduate students receiving support from the Center and gaining valuable research experience also increased, from 22 in 1995 to 55 in 2003.
improve the surrounding neighborhoods by increasing affordable housing, expanding job training, and reducing crime. The program also provided community services, including a computer lab, tutoring for middle school children, and adult education. The outreach center’s activities involved a number of UNC and Duke students.
In 1998, two years after Hurricanes Bertha and Fran caused extensive damage to the North Carolina coast, the Center reestablished its relationship with the NC Division of Coastal Management (DCM). DCM funded a study headed by David Godschalk to investigate ways to improve the state’s hazard mitigation planning. After assembling information on hazard mitigation plans in other states, the study made recommendations to DCM on changes to hazard mitigation legislation in North Carolina.
From 1996 to 1999, the Center hosted visiting researchers through the Floyd B. McKissick Visiting Scholar program. The program, funded by Shirley Weiss (now retired from the University) and her husband, Charles Weiss, supported weeklong visits during which these scholars gave lectures and led discussions on their specific area of interest. The Center continues to house the Weiss’ book collection on urban livability, and serves as regular host to the Weiss Urban Livability Fellows, an interdisciplinary group of graduate students.
An important issue that emerged in urban research around this time was the idea of smart growth, a set of practices and theories that look to combat the negative effects of sprawling development. In 1999, the Center hosted a series of meetings led by David Godschalk and attended by state and local decision makers, as well as University students, staff, and faculty. These meetings produced draft legislation for the North Carolina General Assembly on smart growth, which was introduced by Senator Howard Lee in the same year.
In 2002, the Center partnered with the University’s Center for the Study of the American South on an initiative to study the impacts of affordable home ownership. The project, co-sponsored by the Enterprise Foundation and the National Building Museum, resulted in a multi-disciplinary conference in the fall of 2003 with over 100 attendees. In addition to targeting policymakers and fellow researchers, the project had a large public outreach component through an oral history and photography exhibition, first at a mobile gallery in San Antonio, Texas, and then at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.16 This project was codirected by Rohe and Harry Watson, Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, who coedited a book entitled Chasing the American Dream: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Affordable Homeownership, based on papers commissioned for the conference (Cornell University Press, 2007).
During this time period, the Center also conducted
a number of research projects for the North Carolina Governor’s Crime Commission, dealing with subjects as wide-ranging as evaluating the efficacy of after-school, community-oriented policing and domestic violence prevention programs, to studying the amount and nature of crimes against Latinos in North Carolina. These projects were conducted by researchers from various disciplines, including Gordon Whitaker from UNC’s Institute of Government and Anna Waller from the Department of Emergency Medicine. The most recent Crime Commission project was a 2005 study examining juvenile structured day and alternative learning programs conducted by James Fraser, a Senior Research Associate at the Center.
Into the Future
“I’d like to think of the Center as matchmaker – we match the research interests of our Faculty Fellows with those of foundations and government agencies that fund research.” – Bill Rohe
Since the late 1990s, the Center has been a service-oriented organization, sending out funding alerts to its Faculty Fellows and providing proposal development and grant management assistance. These services have been successful in attracting and retaining researchers from a wide variety of departments and schools across campus. The Scholar-in-Residence program, with funding from the Latane Fund managed by the College of Arts and Sciences, supports College faculty in the development of large interdisciplinary research proposals. This competitive program provides scholars with a course buyout, funds for proposal development expenses, and office space in Hickerson House.
In 2005, the Center established the Carolina Transportation Program, a joint effort undertaken with the Department of City and Regional Planning, with funding from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development. The program’s focus areas include transportation planning, transit, non-motorized transportation, and land use patterns and their impacts on health, environment, energy and economic development at local, regional, national, and global scales. Since its inception, the program’s faculty and staff have published over 20 articles and reports, and it has organized a regular series of seminars. The program also actively supports graduate students interested in transportation issues. Asad Khattak was CTP’s initial director, and Daniel Rodriguez, an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, assumed that position in 2006.
specializing in natural hazards mitigation. At the end of 2007, the Center supported 72 Faculty Fellows from 23 academic units and employed three research associates. Departments that are particularly well represented in the Faculty Fellows program continue to be City and Regional Planning, Geography, and Anthropology, but in recent years, there have also been Fellows from a variety of departments and schools.
In its 50th year, the Center managed approximately 35 projects totaling over $10 million in six major areas of research: economic development, environmental protection, housing and community development, poverty and equity, sustainable development, and transportation. The Center’s long history of work on natural hazards continues as Hurricane Katrina brought hazard mitigation back into the national spotlight. The Center’s more recent work on natural hazards includes FEMA-funded studies on improving emergency preparedness in disadvantaged communities, a study of factors influencing flood victims’ buyout decisions, and an NSF-funded mentoring program for emerging hazards researchers. Center staff, led by Senior Research Associate Spencer Cowan, have also been involved in disaster recovery planning in the Gentilly area of New Orleans.
The Center for Urban and Regional Studies continues to promote the mission of the University by supporting urban and regional research and applying that research throughout the state and nation. To date, the Center has published over 1,150 reports, monographs, and books detailing its work. It also contributes to the teaching mission by involving students in the many research projects managed by the Center.
Conclusion
“…research in this discipline can make a difference. I think there is an ethical responsibility for those in the academy to speak to real problems and real issues in this state.” – David Brower
Over the years, the Center for Urban and Regional Studies has made major contributions to research on a wide range of urban and regional issues. From its humble beginnings within the Institute for Research in Social Science, the Center has grown into a nationally respected center for research on the issues that affect people and the places they live, work, and play. The Center has maintained its original dedication to research and education: researchers are provided the opportunity to pursue the study of important topics while students are given the opportunity to hone their research skills on policy-relevant projects.
The research conducted through the Center has enriched national debates on urban and regional issues, and influenced a broad range of development issues throughout the state and nation. The Center plans to
continue building upon its successful track record as it moves into the future.
Endnotes
1 Guy Benton Johnson and Guion Griffis Johnson, Research in Service to Society: The First Fifty Years of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 272 2 Ibid., p. 273
3 Ibid., p. 274 4 Ibid., p. 308-309
5 A Ten-Year Interdisciplinary Effort in Urban Studies, (Chapel Hill: Center for Urban and Regional Studies, University of North Carolina, 1963), 1; Research in Service to Society, p. 309
6 1957-58 CURS Annual Report, p. 1
7 A Ten Year Interdisciplinary Effort in Urban Studies, p. 2
8 F. Stuart Chapin and Shirley F. Weiss, Eds.,Urban Growth Dynamics in a Regional Cluster of Cities
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962), 1 9 Stuart Chapin memo to James Prochro, July 24, 1963
10 1961-62 CURS Annual Report, p. 3 11 Chapin written statement
12 F. Stuart Chapin, Human Activity Patterns in the City (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), vii 13 Ray Burby Interview
14 1996-97 CURS Annual Report, Attachment E 15 1996-97 CURS Annual Report, p. 1
